![]() The couple was transported to Auschwitz, never to be seen again. Four days later, the Germans took Anni and Fritz. They confided the boys’ whereabouts to their friend Marie Paupaert, asking her to look out for the children in the event of their own arrest. In February 1944, aware of the intensifying Gestapo roundups of Jews in their area, the Finalys placed their two small boys in a nursery in a nearby town. Despite a mounting official campaign against the Jews in France, the Finalys had both boys circumcised, in accordance with Jewish law, eight days after birth. ![]() In 1941, Robert, the Finalys’ first child, was born, followed by Gérald 15 months later. Settling in 1939 in a small town just outside Grenoble, in southeastern France, they did their best to make a life for themselves, although Fritz’s ability to practice medicine was hampered by the anti-Semitic laws installed by Marshal Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy government following the German conquest of France in 1940. Having escaped from Austria following its annexation by Nazi Germany, in 1938, they had hoped to flee to South America, but like so many desperate Jews at the time they found it impossible to find passage there. A Secret Baptismįritz Finaly, a medical doctor, was 37 and his wife, Anni, was 28 when the Germans came for them. The newly available Vatican documents, reported here for the first time, offer fresh insights into larger questions of how the Vatican thought about and reacted to the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, and into the Vatican’s mindset immediately after the war about the Holocaust, the Jewish people, and the Roman Catholic Church’s role and prerogatives as an institution. Kertzer: What the Vatican’s secret archives are about to reveal Meanwhile, conservatives in the Church continue to push for the canonization of Pius XII as a saint.ĭavid I. The memoranda, steeped in anti-Semitic language, involve discussions at the highest level about whether the pope should lodge a formal protest against the actions of Nazi authorities in Rome. The silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust has long engendered bitter debates about the Roman Catholic Church and Jews. ![]() At the center of this drama was an official of the Vatican curia who, as we now know from other newly revealed documents, helped persuade Pope Pius XII not to speak out in protest after the Germans rounded up and deported Rome’s Jews in 1943-“the pope’s Jews,” as Jews in Rome had often been referred to. The Vatican helped direct efforts by local Church authorities to resist French court rulings and to keep the boys hidden, while at the same time carefully concealing the role that Rome was playing behind the scenes. What was not known at the time-and what, in fact, could not be known until the opening, earlier this year, of the Vatican archives covering the papacy of Pius XII-is the central role that the Vatican and the pope himself played in the kidnapping drama. It was a struggle that pitted France’s Jewish community, so recently devastated by the Holocaust, against the country’s Roman Catholic hierarchy, which insisted that the boys were now Catholic and must not be raised by Jews. Le Monde, typical of much of the French media, devoted 178 articles in the first half of the year to the story of the brothers-secretly baptized at the direction of the Catholic woman who had cared for them-and the desperate attempts by surviving relatives to get them back. The case sparked intense public controversy. The charge: kidnapping two young Jewish boys, Robert and Gérald Finaly, whose parents had perished in a Nazi death camp. ![]() Over the next several weeks, other French clergy-monks and nuns-would also be arrested. In early 1953, the photograph of a prominent nun being arrested was splashed across the front pages of French newspapers.
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